Julian Seward's blog

We’ve been chipping away at memory use of Firefox 4 for a couple of months now, with good results.  Recently, though, I’ve been wondering if we’re measuring the right things.  It seems to me there’s two important things to measure: Maximum virtual address space use for the process.  Why is this important?  Because if the [...]

Some background Back in March last year I spent some time using Valgrind’s Helgrind tool to look for data races in the browser.  Data races happen when two threads access the same piece of memory without any form of synchronisation (either locking or the use of atomic operations), and at least one of the accesses [...]

It’s been a good month or more since we started the current round of chasing space problems in Firefox.  Considerable effort has gone into identifying and fixing memory hogs.  Although the individual fixes are often excellent, I’ve haven’t had the big picture on how we’re doing. So today I did some 3 way profiling, comparing [...]